UPCOMING EVENTS

It’s official: For the fourth year in a row, Google will host its annual I/O developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. (The event previously took place in San Francisco.) The dates — May 7 to May 9 — were confirmed to VentureBeat by a company spokesperson hours after a savvy Twitter user uncovered them in a plaintext file tied to an online puzzle.

Registration will take place from February 21-27, Google said.

As for this year’s itinerary, that remains up in the air — we’re expecting to learn more in the weeks ahead. But I/O, which regularly attracts thousands of developers around the world, is typically where Google makes some of its biggest product announcements of the year. For instance, last year‘s conference topics ranged from Google Assistant, Gmail, Google News, Android, Chrome OS, and Google Play to Alphabet’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, and Google’s in-house Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) AI accelerator chips.

At previous I/O shows, Google introduced Google Cardboard, Google Photos, Google Fit, and the now-shuttered Google Wave, among other things. This time around, we’re expecting the next major version of Android — Android Q — to make an appearance, likely with a system-wide dark mode and enhanced privacy controls in tow. New Google Assistant capabilities are pretty much a given. And while Google typically reserves hardware announcements for its annual Made by Google event in October, there’s the slimmest chance we’ll learn more about the Google Pixel 3’s long-rumored midrange counterpart, the Pixel 3 Lite.

Ticket pricing hasn’t yet been announced, but general admission to I/O 2018 started at $1,150 (academic tickets for full-time students, professors, faculty, and staff remained $375), and if past years are any indication, it’ll be a lottery affair. You’ll have to submit an application, and Google will randomly select the winners.

There’s no need to fret if you aren’t picked to go, though. Google I/O 2019 keynotes and breakout sessions will be livestreamed on YouTube and recorded for posterity. If you can’t attend, that’s your best bet — along with our coverage, which we’ll be filing on-site.